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Comment by edvinbesic | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that Apple has been running their OSs on ARM for years now so it wouldn't exactly be groundbreaking for them. Kind of like how when they switched to Intel they had already has x86 builds running for years prior. It's only a matter of time really.

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There are a fair number of people buying Apple Laptops that use them for virtualizing Windows. I'd expect that a transition to ARM would only be able to happen for some of the lineup. It couldn't be across the board as it wouldn't run Windows. That would present a new challenge for folks who don't understand much about tech and wouldn't be able to differentiate the product lines properly.

Isn't Windows ARM ready now? A bunch of ARM laptops w/ Windows 10 are coming out this year.

I think it requires special hardware (x86 emulation, which is 32 bit only), and many apps won't be ported to ARM for a while.

That being said Apple might find x86 emulation useful too.

So you run on ARM just to do x86 emulation? How does it work?

Windows might have been recompiled to ARM but it will take a while before all apps have. That's also why WinRT was a failure. You couldn't run anything useful on it.

RT's big problem was the lockdown. They wanted everyone to use the Windows Store. You can't even run architecture-neutral .NET apps on the desktop in RT without a developer unlock.

Yes, but the two things that keep people using Windows are legacy applications and games. They’d also have to be ported to ARM, and I don’t see that happening in a hurry.

Microsoft has been demoing x86 emulation on ARM for a while now (https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/P4171)

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